The little cheap flashcard that its bigger brothers couldn’t topple. That’s the R4i Gold. Boasting 99.9% Clean ROM compatibility, SDHC compatibility and a custom Moonshell interface, the budget £6 cartridge can store more than 100 games for the price of less than a quarter of an actual DS game.

The Product

The R4i Gold which we procured from Lightake.com as a test of their shipping, reliability and ability to respond to customer service was provided in a gold-effect cardboard box. Upon opening the box, I was confronted with a flimsy plastic tray which housed a single microSD card reader and a blue plastic R4i Gold carry case.

First Impressions: 7/10

The Card

The actual product is as big as a DS cartridge. The build quality feels cheaper than the original R4s, and the plastic is blatantly the cheapest type. The unit is of a grey colour and there is a microSD slot on the top right of the card, where a microSD can be held using friction (it isn’t spring loaded).

The cartridge has an issue when inserting into 3DS, DSi and DSi XL systems. It requires minimal physical force to remove, but does get stuck about ¾ way into the slot when removing. The DS Lite does not suffer from this problem. The R4i Gold does feel like it will not clip into place sometimes, and requires a minimal touch force to slot into the system, but that is to be expected from robust, but cheap, build quality and the modest price tag. The bottom line is, you can’t have it all.

A contact from the R4i Gold team has told us that this problem will be “rectified in new set[s] of R4i Gold Card, identifiable with new packaging”. Since my review sample was shipped before the new packaging was rolled into production, my R4i Gold does unfortunately suffer from the sticking problem, leaving a First Impressions score of 7.

First Impressions: 7/10

The R4i Gold running Pokémon Black

The Kernel

The R4i Gold boots up to any _DS_MENU.DAT file on the microSD cart in root file position. The R4i Gold’s site at r4ids.cn points to the use of an immediate custom Moonshell front-end which looks remarkably like the DSi Menu. That is it. Nothing more. There is nothing the Custom Moonshell front-end can do that any other program cannot. The extlink function seems to open WoodR4 for .nds files, and WoodR4 does indeed have 99.9% compatibility with ROMs.

With WoodR4, my previous experience was that it could open patched and unpatched files (On the original R4). On the R4i Gold, it can only open clean .nds ROMs and translated patches. Upon running a patched version of “Pokémon Black”, the R4i would display a white two-screen view. The same was seen for “Solatorobo: Red The Hunter”. A Clean version of both ROMs ran perfectly. This is not a review of WoodR4, and you can search for it somewhere else if you want a more in-depth overview of YWG’s game launching software.

3DS owners could easily update their card with simply running an NDS file from the home menu of Wood R4, but the update procedure did have a failure rate. After a quick internet search, the failure rate seems to be 1 in 5, but the R4i Gold team are apparently working on this to make it a 0% failure rate.

The fact that it cannot run patched NDS files is an annoyance, so the kernel gets 6.5 as opposed to 7/10.

First Impressions: 6.5/10

The Supplier

Lightake is the supplier that we chose to order from. The R4i Gold (x2 of them) came in a cheap, unbranded Jiffy Bag; and the two boxes were dented slightly. One of the R4i Gold cards were actually a mis-branded R4-SDHC, only compatible with DS Lites, resulting in it not working at all on 3DS and DSi systems. However, this was clearly a manufacturer fault, as there were no signs of card tampering at all apart from a smaller sticker, but that was flush and untouched.

We contacted their customer service, and each email was answered after 30 hours, and their personal messaging contact on a certain Video games forum was a nice touch, and increased the social aspect of their customer service.. The representatives were courteous and eager to help.

The product was shipped within one month, and postage was free- their prices were the cheapest we could salvage, and the postal tracking worked fine after customer service had pointed me the right way so that I could use it.

First Impressions: 7/10

All In All

Product : 7/10Card : 7/10Kernel : 6.5/10Supplier : 7/10

The R4i Gold card from Lightake is a good little budget card for the budget market that can do just as much as its more expensive competitors, the Acekard 2i, and more than other non-cloned cards that haven’t even updated to work with DSi and 3DS consoles yet.

Lightake is a good supplier, and their customer service is impeccable.